The parent company of Saratoga and North Creek Railway has begun moving tanker cars into the Adirondacks for storage. Dylan Smith, a North River resident, took the video below on Tuesday. He described them as “just old tankers–some rusty, some not, all covered in graffiti.” Environmental groups and public officials have come out against the railway’s plan to store the cars on tracks between North Creek and Tahawus. Environmentalists are concerned that the cars will leak and pollute the adjacent Forest Preserve. The company has refused to say what had been stored in the cars. Look for a full story >>More

Last weekend I was returning from Nubble Cliff in the Giant Mountain Wilderness when I passed a tent on the southeast shore of the Giant’s Washbowl and heard someone breaking branches or dead trees, presumably gathering wood for a campfire. Campfires are an Adirondack tradition. Who doesn’t like a fire when sleeping under the stars? Nevertheless, I couldn’t help thinking that this was not good for the environment. Rather, it was destructive. The state Department of Environmental Conservation banned campfires in the eastern High Peaks for a reason. Over time, campers collecting wood left patches of forest virtually denuded. DEC >>More

The Open Space Institute has purchased a 618-acre parcel along Lake Champlain, including 4,000 feet of shoreline, and plans to sell it to the state to be added to the forever-wild Forest Preserve. The property lies across from Schuyler Island, an undeveloped island already in the Forest Preserve. OSI bought the land, which includes Trembleau Mountain, from the Gellert family for $500,000. It offers views of the High Peaks, Lake Champlain, and the Green Mountains of Vermont. The Department of Environmental Conservation plans to create trails after the state acquires the property. The highest summit of Trembleau is owned by >>More

The state has added the historic Marion River carry to the Forest Preserve, ending a long-running dispute over the ownership of 216 parcels of land near the hamlet of Raquette Lake. The deal secures a five-hundred-yard trail used by paddlers portaging between Utowana Lake and the Marion River. The carry is an essential part of a canoe route between Blue Mountain Lake and Raquette Lake. The Open Space Institute bought the 296-acre parcel in 2012 for $2 million and transferred it to the state this year at no cost to the state. Before OSI stepped in, the Marion River property >>More

Adirondack Wilderness Advocates has sent the Adirondack Park Agency a detailed paper, replete with photos, maps, and charts, arguing for a Wilderness classification for nearly all of the 20,758-acre Boreas Ponds Tract. The 46-page document also contains recommendations for several other lands recently added to the public Forest Preserve. The first half of the document is devoted to the Boreas Ponds Tract, the most controversial and largest of the classification decisions facing the APA. Adirondack Wilderness Advocates was formed last year by Bill Ingersoll, Brendan Wiltse, and Pete Nelson to counter classification proposals from environmental groups that they say fail >>More

The Adirondack Park Agency board will soon lose its strongest defender of wilderness: Dick Booth does not intend to serve another term. Booth’s current four-year term expires June 30, but he said he will stay on awhile if a successor is not appointed by then. A professor in Cornell’s Department of City and Regional Planning, Booth told the Adirondack Explorer he is leaving partly out of frustration with decisions at the agency. He also said the long drive from Ithaca to Ray Brook for monthly meetings and poring over stacks of documents in preparation for those meetings proved draining over >>More

Last winter Carol Fox and I skied from Averyville outside Lake Placid to Oseetah Lake outside Saranac Lake, following an old woods road that constitutes part of the northern boundary of the High Peaks Wilderness. We had a great time. You will be able to read about our adventure in a forthcoming issue of the Adirondack Explorer. On Labor Day weekend I returned to the old road with my mountain bike and rode about six and a half miles to Pine Pond, a beautiful body of water with a sandy beach. As on our ski trip, I saw ample evidence >>More

The 22,560-acre Pepperbox in the western Adirondacks is one of the smaller Wilderness Areas in the Park, but it also is one of the wildest. It has no lean-tos and only two miles of foot trails. The State Land Master Plan observes that the lack of a trail system “offers an opportunity to retain a portion of the Adirondack landscape in a state that even a purist might call wilderness.” Now the state Department of Environmental Conservation is proposing to create a 1.3-mile trail to Gregg Lake and build a lean-to at a primitive campsite on the lake. The trail >>More

Environmental groups are threatening to take to a higher court their battle against a mining company’s plan to drill for wollastonite in the Jay Mountain Wilderness. On Thursday, Earthjustice filed a notice of appeal with the Appellate Division of State Supreme Court, a step that preserves its right to appeal the dismissal of a lawsuit against NYCO Minerals, the state Department of Environmental Conservation, and the Adirondack Park Agency. “The agencies’ determinations here really were illegal and null and void, and they shouldn’t be allowed to go forward,” said Hannah Chang, an attorney for Earthjustice, a nonprofit organization that specializes >>More